BREXIT HITS THE 1% WHERE IT HURTS; THE WALLET

But, what economy are they talking about? Is it the economy in which 1% of the population is hoarding around 49% of the collective wealth?
It can't be about the other 99% of the population because, for them, the economy has already been wrecked and there's very little left to hit them with.Sen. Bernie Sanders was on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and said he saw it as an indication of income inequality. “What I think this vote is about is an indication that the global economy is not working for everybody,” he said. “You know, it’s not working in the United States for everybody, and it’s not working in the U.K. for everybody.”Consumer debt is at an all time high Consumer Debt Hits Record High — and That’s a Good Thing?

U.S. credit-card balances are on track to hit $1 trillion this year, as banks aggressively push their plastic and consumers grow more comfortable carrying debt.

That sum would come close to the all-time peak of $1.02 trillion set in July 2008, just before the financial crisis intensified, and could signal an easing of frugal habits ingrained by the recession.

The boom has been driven by steady economic conditions and an improving job market that have made creditworthy consumers less reluctant to take on debt. In addition, lenders have signed up millions of subprime consumers who previously weren’t able to get credit.

Consumers are taking on other forms of debt, too. Auto-loan balances surpassed $1 trillion in the first quarter, a record for the industry, according to a report Thursday from credit bureau Experian.

The West’s powers-that-be, in both the United States and the European Union, too often display contempt for real democracy, maintaining only the façade of respecting the popular will, manipulating voters at election time with red-meat politics and empty promises – before getting back to the business of comforting the comfortable and letting the comfortable afflict the afflicted.

That has been the grim and tiresome reality with America’s two parties and with the E.U.’s bureaucrats. The average American and the average European have every reason to see themselves as a lesser concern to the politicians and the pundits than the special interests which pay the money and call the tune.

In the stunning “Brexit” vote – with 52 percent wanting to abandon the 28-nation European Union – U.K. voters rejected the West’s politics-as-usual despite dire warnings about the downsides of leaving. They voted, in effect, to assert their own nationalistic needs and aspirations over a commitment to continental unity and its more universal goals.

But, in the vote, there was also a recognition that the West’s Establishment has grown corrupt and arrogant, routinely imposing on the people “experts” who claim to be neutral technocrats or objective scholars but whose pockets are lined with fat pay checks from “prestigious” think tanks funded by the Military-Industrial Complex or by lucrative revolving-door trips to investment banks on Wall Street or The City.

Despite the Establishment’s self-image as a “meritocracy,” its corrupted experts and haughty bureaucrats don’t even demonstrate basic competence anymore. They have led Europe and the United States into catastrophe after catastrophe, both economically and geopolitically. And, there is another troubling feature of this Establishment: its lack of accountability.

In the United States, the rewards and punishments have been turned upside-down, with the benighted politicians and pundits who pushed for the Iraq War in 2003 still dominating the government and the media, from Hillary Clinton’s impending Democratic presidential nomination to the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post.